Sunday, 22 May 2016

Wanna Gag?

I didn't want to gag. The doctor made me. So, to cut direct to the conclusion, my endoscopy gave pretty close to an all clear, nothing sinister going on inside these guts. There's still a test result to come for a bacteria the gastro dude felt was a possibility but there's nothing in the way of polyps or weird stuff happening.

The endoscopy was kind of unpleasant. Not painful, not particularly horror story material, but unpleasant. I opted for sedation and the throat spray, one or other of which was meant to deaden my gag reflex. Not my gag reflex, no sirree, that's live and well and undeterred by such things as mere medication. It put up a good fight against the tube despite all the breathing and relaxing I was doing in a token gesture kind of a way. Difficult to focus on those things when your body has other ideas. And a long liquorice like tube went into me and at some point it came out and I was wheeled into recovery where I could quietly watch my resting heart rate and see it rise when I stressed out about farting. That's a side effect of them pumping air into your stomach so their camera can have a good look around. It feels slightly anti social even though you know the other three or four women in the room are presumably having the same issues.

Then there were instructions. A responsible adult for four hours. Fella found that horrifying, what, spend four full hours with his girlfriend? Perish the thought. Then the alarming don't operate machinery or kitchen appliances. Wait. Hold on right there. Not even the kettle? No, apparently I'm not safe to operate the kettle. No driving for 24 hours, fine, no worries. No big decisions. I was glad about the no big decisions. After we walked around Sainsbury's and then on to Co-op for chorizo (not sold in our dinky Sainsbury's), I wanted to buy ice cream in co-op. Turned out we'd already bought ice cream in Sainsbury's. Big decisions would clearly have been a bit of an issue.